Re: Imp. Vampiric Embrace

I have built a dps simulation in excel to test out various talents for myself and one of the things I wanted to test was 2/3 P&S as well as 2/3 Shadowweaving.

My simulator assumes infinite mana, 10min encounter, 0 latency (this needs to be fixed but that's what it is atm) and no need to move/stop casting.

In those perfect circumstances for a 10min encounter you will need to recast SW:P 2-3 times if you take 2/3 P&S. Perhaps that's an argument that you don't need to take 3/3, afterall having to recase SW:P 2-3 times in 10mins isn't that much of a big deal in terms of dps loss and mana burn. However, I don't think enough thought has been put into how this applies in a practical sense. You won't be able to dps 100% of the time in every encounter, encounters will require you to move, dps off if your threat is too high, perhaps throw the occasional heal/PW:S. You certainly are going to lose 6 seconds cast time when you use dispersion, and what about bosses that have high shadow resist? Or even yet, what about gearing up when you don't have 100% hit?

When you evaluate 2/3 P&S with how you dps in a practical sense it's a pretty big risk to take to squeeze all of 1 talent point into something else. I saw how bad 2/3 P&S was when I was doing the HH event, those few seconds of having to switch dps targets resulted in my SW:P falling off nearly every time.

So while maths or even simulations might show 2/3 P&S to be very close to 3/3, in reality it's not and I would expect you to see a significant difference in dps and mana usage if you just take 3/3.

Re: Imp. Vampiric Embrace

I disagree, it's a needed talent because you won't be able to cast 4 MF's every 18sec when you factor in moving, threat sensitive encounters, dpsing down 2nd targets (being adds or whatever), bosses gaining damage immunities at verious phases....

For 1 talent point it will provide significant mana effecency and dps when applied in a practical sense rather than looking at it from a pure mathematical sense.

Re: Imp. Vampiric Embrace

Originally Posted by Ntrails

2% extra healing on the tank from VE is not worth 2 talents. At all. As said above - with 2500DPS it is 50 extra HPS. So it is only useful for self heal now realistically. Even the 150 HPS for party seems worthless to me and not worth the GCD.

Ve gives a constant healing to your party which is a nice little bonus for just 1 click and a global cooldown for a minute. It can relieve a small bit of healing done from the healers in difficult situations. If you look at healing done through recount after encounters you see SP actually heal quite a lot of dmg through it atm, so why not use it?

2/3 pain and suffering is indeed a too big of a risk (at least for me) to not pick it up for 1 extra talent point.

I dont think mind flay was to give 3 charges of shdweaving in the first place. This might be changed though seeing Blizzard is gonna make it more like Arcane missiles. (I doubt it will though).

About threat we cannot say that much yet untill we are level 80 and start raiding. Maybe the 30% from shadowform is enough to deal with. And with improved fade you can fade quite often as well.

And Imp shd form IS (using your caps tactic) very usefull in raids. Just think of fights with a lot of aoe dmg or mobs with dmging auras (felmyst and MH thrash).

Re: Imp. Vampiric Embrace

Taking a point out of shadowweaving is a bad idea as well... my simulation data suggests the uptime of shadowweaving is affected poorly with just 2/3 and the last thing you want to do is to delay casting dots until you have a full stack of weaving... it will hurt your SW:P damage in particular.

Re: Imp. Vampiric Embrace

Originally Posted by Anglarana

Ve gives a constant healing to your party which is a nice little bonus for just 1 click and a global cooldown for a minute. It can relieve a small bit of healing done from the healers in difficult situations. If you look at healing done through recount after encounters you see SP actually heal quite a lot of dmg through it atm, so why not use it?

Because currently it does base 15% - and is amazingly powerful. When it drops to 3% I simply do not think it is valuable enough. In raids the damage will be CoH/Chained up quickly anyway and I cannot see an amount of damage being done that would not be healed by the healer anyway, more quickly and efficiently.

It was overpowered. Stacking 3 SP's in tank group would still be useful, of course. I feel like now, instead of being usefull healing it probably just results in healers doing more overheal. *shrugs*

Re: Imp. Vampiric Embrace

Originally Posted by Ntrails

Because currently it does base 15% - and is amazingly powerful. When it drops to 3% I simply do not think it is valuable enough. In raids the damage will be CoH/Chained up quickly anyway and I cannot see an amount of damage being done that would not be healed by the healer anyway, more quickly and efficiently.

It was overpowered. Stacking 3 SP's in tank group would still be useful, of course. I feel like now, instead of being usefull healing it probably just results in healers doing more overheal. *shrugs*

Personal preference.

This is my school of thought as well... I also have a feeling that we won't see raid damage like we did in SWP, at least not early on... so I doubt that Imp VE is going to be all that useful. Combined into that is the fact that we are likely to drop SW from the rotation, we might use it early on to build SW stacks quickly but simulationcraft is showing that the use of SW is providing a very small dps gain in starter gear to a dps loss in proper end game gear.

I think i'd prefer the choice of losing points in imp VE than in other places in the tree. If raid damage is non existent I don't see how imp SF is all that useful either, but it's something i'll take to level and evaluate as I do content.

Re: Imp. Vampiric Embrace

Since the original patch that improved our shadowform to reduce our threat, i have never had an issue with threat when I had VE up. I would also be 2nd on healing and like 1st in overhealing. This is prior to the VE nerf. I dont think threat is an issue for shadow priests anymore, especially with the tanking buff most of the tanks received in the past two patches.

Re: Imp. Vampiric Embrace

Seems to me that everyone arguing over whether to put two points or three into P&S is a little lazy. If you hit MF more than once you are restarting SW:P and therefore making it completely useless. Like any DoT you must let it cycle and then refresh it. MF is channeled and therefore a usefull filler in between cool downs. If you use it more than once you have replaced SW:P dmg with MF dmg. However, if you get a mod or just watch the boss you can refresh SW:P when its going off, get all the available ticks out of it, and stack the dmg. For me, the lowered dmg from my SW does not make it worth my time. Yes, everyone will have a different way of doing this, after all we aren't locks spamming shadowbolt. Before you ask, yes I did test the talent and then respecced putting my lovely points elsewhere. Dps much higher after getting rid of P&S. My advice, do your dailies, respec everyday if you have to, find what works for you. If you rarely use MF, go for P&S, if you like it as a filler like I do, don't bother unless the dmg you do with SW:P is negligible anyway.

Re: Imp. Vampiric Embrace

I agree that threat isn't an issue at the moment but i'm not going to make claims that once you're full raid geared in LK that threat can be ignored. I'd be reserving judgement about how many points you will need to take in shadow affinity... but I agree it seems a place you might be able to steal a point or 2 if required.

The first spec i'll test out will be (sorry my browser doesn't seem to like the calc on wowwiki for some reason).